The Life of the Mind

by Christine Smallwood

  “Stand there, I’ll take your picture,” said Judith, holding out a hand for Dorothy’s phone, pushing Dorothy near the “canal,” where employees in red scarves and striped shirts guided gondolas laden with shouting tourists. Everyone in the casino was shouting; it was the only way to be heard. “Now you can tell everyone you’ve been to Venice,” Judith shouted, and Dorothy wondered how Judith knew that Dorothy hadn’t been to Venice. Was it that obvious? Dorothy asked why Judith wasn’t staying at Harrah’s with the rest of the conference and Judith, instead of laughing, glowered a little and impatiently adjusted her kimono. Dorothy had always been guilty of making uninteresting small talk. That was probably why she had failed as a thinker: too much chitchat, too many conversations about the weather, the traffic, where were you born, what did your mother do?

  Judith handed back the phone. It was a good photo. The lighting or something was flattering. Dorothy was grateful to have it. In every photo Rog took of her, there was something wrong with her face. It sometimes made her wonder if Rog didn’t love her the way he said he did, if the bad photos he took were his way of expressing animosity. But that same logic would dictate that Judith loved Dorothy, and that couldn’t be true.

  “I love Vegas,” Judith said, as if she could read Dorothy’s mind. She waved a hand over her domain. “When the real Venice is underwater, this will be all we’ll have. It won’t be a question of remembering it or not. This will be Venice. This is Venice!”

  For a moment Dorothy thought Judith was going to make them get into a gondola, but Judith turned, setting the parrots on the back of her kimono into flight, and announced her desire to sit by the pool at the Palazzo.

  “Let’s go home,” Judith said.

  “I want to hear all about you,” Judith said. “Impress me.”

  * * *

  —

  There were eleven pools at the Palazzo. The one that Judith chose for their tête-à-tête was not long enough to swim laps and in a shape that Dorothy didn’t know the word for; it was curved on two sides and straight on the other two, like a bone. They sat on plastic chaises and ordered piña coladas from a short, television-handsome waiter. The palm trees were sprightly and stiff, and had an incognito air, as if wearing wigs of fronds.

  The temperature had plummeted since yesterday’s spike. Dorothy and Judith kept their arms covered in cardigan/kimono. It was like they had stepped into a picture, like they were moving around inside the idea of a tropical paradise without actually risking any of the sunburn/discomfort of being in a tropical paradise. It was an experience of pure tourism, of the idea of tourism. Dorothy didn’t really want to visit the tropics, anyway; she had political objections, and also, she did not like sand.

  “Palm trees make me sad,” said Judith.

  Dorothy agreed. It was pleasant to agree with Judith, to be reclining on the plastic chaise, which was not a flimsy plastic, but a sturdy and luxurious plastic, a plastic that would be handed down from generation to generation. She was grateful they were not in a gondola. The waiter came by with their drinks, topped with huge chunks of pineapple. At last, a twisty straw of her own! She took a bite of fruit and the juice ran down her chin and she wiped it with a cocktail napkin. She said something idle about sustainability, how palm trees sucked resources from the desert environment, how, yes, that was a cause for sadness.

  “That’s not it,” said Judith. Judith always had the ability to make Dorothy feel like a puppy who had crapped on the carpet. She wagged a finger like Dorothy was being mischievous or trying to get attention, but Dorothy was only ever trying to give the right answer. “It’s that they’re so far from home.”

  Back in graduate school, at the height of Judith’s torture of Dorothy, when Dorothy routinely wept into Rog’s arms at night over some slight or out of fear of Judith’s rejection and omnipotence, Rog had happened to catch sight of Judith out in the wild. It had happened quite by chance. He and Dorothy were walking down Sixth Avenue on their way to a movie when they saw Judith heading toward them. As she walked, she was eating a piece of pizza, folded up in a paper plate, over a paper bag. Dorothy immediately pulled Rog off the sidewalk and into a CVS.

  “That’s the woman you live in fear of?” Rog had asked. “That woman who is eating pizza from a bag?”

  If Dorothy squinted, she could almost see Judith as Rog did. Judith no longer held absolute power over Dorothy. They were two adults, not quite colleagues, but professional relations, reclining poolside, of their own free will, at a work function. Alas, equally true was that so long as Dorothy wanted Judith to send out letters of recommendation on her behalf, Judith was like a god or the weather or a weather god, a condition fixed and capricious that Dorothy had to endure and perform mysterious rites to placate. She could always rebel, of course. She could burn the bridge, treat Judith as the ridiculous self-important footnote that Rog believed she was—but that was easy for Rog to say; he hadn’t read Judith’s books. Judith’s books were the reason Dorothy had gone to graduate school. Rebellion against Judith would be rebellion against Dorothy’s whole life.

  “I see what you mean,” Dorothy said. “The palm trees are far from home.”

  Wavy teal lines painted on the bottom of the pool gave the water the illusion of dancing. A cluster of ambitious or optimistic women or perhaps just women who did not update the weather app daily shivered in bikinis and tiaras. Their discomfort was the homage or honor they paid to the bride among them, a jubilant pixie in a white sash that read SLUT. The SLUT dipped a toe into the water and declared it warm enough. At a command from her tanned lieutenant, festively attired in two strips of American flag, all the troops waded down the steps. They grimaced, shrieked, laughed, held hands. They looked like an advertisement for friends.

  “I’m glad to see you,” Judith said, in a voice that was newly thick. “I know that you’ll understand.”

  In years past, whenever Judith had come to Dorothy with some problem that only Dorothy could understand, by which Judith meant, only Dorothy could solve, Dorothy had readily and eagerly thrown herself into the challenge. Usually the problem involved a computer file that needed to be retrieved from the downloads folder, or a scheduling conflict that had to be sorted out, or a course packet that needed photocopying. Occasionally it was something that Dorothy had to solve through an emotional maneuver; perhaps Judith needed her to agree that a rival in the department was being outrageous. Perhaps Dorothy had to type while Judith dictated a difficult letter sinking a junior professor’s manuscript. More seldom it was an intellectual problem that needed sorting, such as recommendations on syllabus design; once, Judith had needed Dorothy to flesh out something she had said in seminar that later appeared, uncredited, in an article by Judith. This last transgression had occurred only once, and yet it seemed the most typical of Judith’s excesses, insofar as it combined flattery, manipulation, outright domination, and coercion; no one could say Dorothy hadn’t been a willing participant. Dorothy’s friends had been outraged on her behalf, especially Micah, but Dorothy wasn’t sure that the idea was, properly speaking, “hers”: It had arisen in Judith’s classroom, prompted by something Judith herself had said, about an article Judith herself had written; the idea, as Dorothy saw it, belonged to both of them, or rather, to neither of them, and all Judith had done was put her name on it first. Was being first a crime?

  When Micah frowned, the corners of his mouth sank all the way to his chin, like a disappointed muppet. “You’ll never get a job with that attitude,” he had prophesied, perched atop a stone planter.

  The luster of solving Judith’s problems had somewhat faded since Dorothy had finished the program and discovered that having been Judith’s not-favorite student didn’t open any doors. Either Judith’s name was worth less than it used to be, or Judith wasn’t trying very hard to help her; Dorothy could never be sure. Still, the desire to please Judith, to earn her praise, was as strong as ever. Besid
es, Dorothy liked that Judith thought she would understand. So often Dorothy felt entirely alone; even with the people she loved most she felt encased in a diving bell or a clear plastic box, a cheap one, not like the sturdy plastic chaise she sat on now, and the things other people went around talking about and doing seemed objectively important and respectable but had no direct relevance to the circumstances of inhabiting her specific, disposable biodome. She was aware that putting it that way was an admission of gross privilege and elitism but such self-laceration only made the feeling of the biodome more pronounced. Dorothy had never really understood Judith, of this she was sure, but she appreciated being treated as if she did. It made her feel special, even as she knew that feeling special was the most perverse form the exploitation could take.

  Today Judith was dealing with the problem of grief. Her longtime editor at Harvard University Press who had published all her seminal texts and others not so seminal had died in a freak accident. He had gone out for a walk on the Cape (his second home) at the height of the afternoon, when the glare off the water was most intense. His foot had lost contact with the rocky footpath, sending his body over the edge. He was discovered the next day by a group of high school students who had gone to a cove to smoke angel dust, a fact that had come out when the parents took a closer look at why their children were on the shore in the middle of the day instead of in school.

  “Some people have been saying he did it on purpose, but that’s because they can’t accept the real tragedy: the accidental nature of the world,” Judith said, motioning to the waiter for another round of piña coladas. “It’s all very sordid.”

  Objectively that had to be so, although it was hard, while reclining in her luxuriously sturdy plastic chaise, poolside with a second piña colada on the way, for Dorothy to feel the impact of the story, to be there on the New England coastline with the angel-dust-smoking teenagers, the bloated editorial body, the cold gray ocean, the tragic inexorability of mischance. It wasn’t that the pool seemed real and the dead body seemed false; it was that nothing seemed real.

  “My friend died,” Judith said, her voice rising in volume, a hammer taken to the surroundings. Dorothy waited for the picture to crack open and reveal them to be back in Judith’s office, where the chair Dorothy had to sit in was a little lower than Judith’s chair, and positioned to look at a portrait of Judith herself, which had been painted by a former student who became an art star in the 1990s, and which hung presidentially over her desk.

  The picture world reverberated but held together. They were not on campus.

  They were at the Palazzo.

  One day this would be Venice.

  “It’s okay,” said Dorothy, hoping that by lowering her own voice, Judith would feel inspired to also speak softly.

  “No,” said Judith louder and more insistently. “It feels good to cry. To let it all out.”

  With no regard for the tears welling in her eyes, Judith accepted the drink the waiter offered and gave him her room number.

  “It’s on me,” she said.

  Such generosity was uncharacteristic. Judith must have been distracted by her tears, which were increasing. The physiological collapse, the lachrymal overflow, that, in a weaker person, would appear as weakness, in Judith only enhanced her strength. The watery sheen cascading down her face did not make her seem quavering or helpless but strong and passionate. She had the strength to cry; she had the force to withstand it. Tears were no match for her spirit. As the weeping increased in speed and volume, Dorothy braced herself for its sudden halt. It was not prudent to expect Judith to go on doing a thing or feeling a feeling simply because she was doing or feeling it with intensity. Judith, Dorothy knew, was one of those unusual people whose charisma and power to terrify are rooted in their unpredictability. Her majesty had a multiplying effect. Whereas some people govern by force of personality, she ruled by a kaleidoscope of personalities. And yet knowing this did not make Dorothy any more prepared to respond. Because even if Judith might do anything or be anyone, Dorothy was still just Dorothy.

  The tears continued, punctuated by little hiccups and wheezing breaths. Dorothy marveled at the ease with which they flowed, as if they had been ready at the barricades, awaiting Judith’s order. Dorothy reached out a pacifying hand but quickly retracted it, unsure of where it should go: On Judith’s leg? On her arm? How high up on the arm? All the way to the shoulder? She patted the smooth plastic of Judith’s chaise instead, and suggested that perhaps they could get Judith’s mind off her personal tragedy by talking about work. Who was on Judith’s panel? Judith snapped back that Dorothy was using a veneer of professionalism to mask her essential and regrettable callousness.

  “What is the point of any of this,” Judith asked, “if we can’t be honest with each other?”

  Judith imagined honesty as a kind of conversation: People were, or could be, honest with one another. She would relish a meta-conversation in which she could exert power while denying it. But honest conversation was pointless, because a declaration of feeling (I hate you/I love you) could never account for the myriad complications of Dorothy’s relation to Judith, complications that manifested as emotional, even spiritual conflict, but were rooted in something material and intractable—their positions in the game. Judith was a teacher and a foster mother and an employer, and more than that, she was a node in a large and impersonal system that had anointed her a winner and Dorothy a loser, and due to institutional and systemic factors that were bigger than either of them—not more complicated, no, because no system is more complicated than a single human being—no one of Dorothy’s generation would ever accrue the kind of power Judith had, and this was a good thing even as it was an unjust and shitty thing. Judith was old and Dorothy was young, Judith had benefits and Dorothy had debts. The idols had been false but they had served a function, and now they were all smashed and no one knew what they were working for. The problem wasn’t the fall of the old system, it was that the new system had not arisen. Dorothy was like a janitor in the temple who continued to sweep because she had nowhere else to be but who had lost her belief in the essential sanctity of the enterprise.

  “Your friend sounds like he was very special,” Dorothy said.

  “He had passion,” Judith said, rooting in the pockets of her kimono for a tissue. Her tears had not stopped falling. “Which is more than I can say of most people.”

  Dorothy nodded.

  “Now you try,” Judith said, and blew her nose primly.

  Dorothy sucked on her straw and was mortified to hear the slurping noise that indicated an empty drink. “What?” she said stupidly. The window of her brain was fogged with piña colada.

  “Cry with me,” said Judith. Her eyes were pink and swollen and glinting like the coins at the bottom of the Venetian fountains. Her lipstick had faded and her lips looked dry and naked. Of course Judith was aware that her lipstick had faded. But she wasn’t going to reapply it. It was an act of will to refuse to reapply lipstick in front of another person. That kind of will was another form of domination.

  Dorothy looked around at her fellow denizens of the poolside. No one from the conference was here. The other conference-goers were sitting in the ballrooms at Harrah’s, or scrambling to finish their papers, or resting; maybe a few of them were on the Strip drinking or gambling, but they were not at the Palazzo, or not anywhere she could see. The women of the bachelorette party were still in the bone-shaped pool; they had the appearance of statues in a garden. Although they were smiling, their eyes looked far away and deadened with alcohol, and their mouths were twisted by effortful good cheer. It was so quiet that Dorothy could hear Judith doing something inside her mouth with her tongue, a bizarre little click that punctuated a low, almost inaudible whine, and reminded Dorothy of the sound of a new slide coming into the projector.

  “Tears are the language of the body,” Dorothy said, by which she meant t
hat they could not be faked, but all Judith shouted was “I taught you that!”

  Judith pointed around, gesturing widely, as if to draw to her all the space she could, to gather up everything she knew, which was everything, so she could dump it all over Dorothy, burying her with wisdom, experience, expertise. Looking up at the Palazzo tower, which was, Judith had told her on the walk over, the tallest building in Las Vegas, Dorothy tried to remember what had happened in her life that had led her to this point. She thought of Kafka’s dog:

  More and more often of late, thinking about my life, I seek out the decisive and fundamental mistake I have probably committed—and can’t find it. And yet I must have committed it, because if I hadn’t and had still not attained what I wanted to attain, in spite of the honest endeavors of a long life, then it would have been proof that what I wanted was impossible, and the consequence would be utter hopelessness. Behold thy life’s work!

  Dorothy took a breath and exhaled and buried her face in her hands and did her best to channel the whimpering mewls of an infant. She thought about war and illness and climate migration and the saddest newspaper article she had ever read, about a man who regularly visited his Alzheimer’s-ridden wife and her nursing home boyfriend; she didn’t recognize her husband, but he never stopped coming, never told her who he—who she—really was. Privately, Dorothy felt proud of her effort. She had done a few school plays in her youth. She did not believe she entirely lacked talent for performance.